BioScience Talks

BioScience Talks , published by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, is the monthly discussion podcast of the journal BioScience.
AIBS is a registered US 501c3 nonprofit organization, EIN: 53-0220853.

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Despite ongoing efforts to increase diversity among STEM faculty, participation rates of faculty members of color remain lower in STEM fields than in other academic disciplines.

In this episode of BioScience Talks, we are joined by Dr. Maria Miriti, whose recent article in BioScience, The Elephant in the Room: Race and STEM Diversity, discusses these shortcomings, their causes, and some of the ways in which they may be best addressed in the future.

Public health officials have argued that thorough and accurate testing for SARS-CoV-2 is essential for gaining a foothold in the fight against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. To date, however, a lack of reliable testing in the United States has hampered efforts to achieve a thorough understanding of the disease's abundance and spread.

In this episode of BioScience Talks, we are joined by Dr. Crystal Icenhour, CEO of Aperiomics, and Dr. Robbie Barbero, Chief Business Officer of Ceres Nanosciences. Both companies have recently ramped up efforts to improve the prospects of broad-scale testing for the novel pathogen in human patients.

Aperiomics, whose core technology uses deep shotgun metagenomic sequencing to test for tens of thousands of bacteria, virus, fungus, and parasite at once, has launched a SARS-CoV-2-specific test, with the aims of increasing test availability and delivering crucially important public health data. Ceres Nanosciences's flagship Nanotrap particle technology enables the capture, concentration, and preservation of low abundance analytes from complex biological samples. The technology is presently being tested with the SARS-CoV-2 and is expected to help in improving the accuracy of existing testing protocols.

This episode is the fourth in our oral history series, In Their Own Words. These pieces chronicle the stories of scientists who have made great contributions to their fields, particularly within the biological sciences. Each month, we will publish in the pages of BioScience, and on this podcast, the results of these conversations. Today we are joined by Dr. Joel Cracraft, curator in the Department of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History. He previously served as president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences

Note: Both the text and audio versions have been edited for clarity and length.